Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff

With extraordinary access to the Trump White House, Michael Wolff tells the inside story of the most controversial presidency of our time.

The first nine months of Donald Trump’s term were stormy, outrageous – and absolutely mesmerising. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, bestselling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself.

In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:

– What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
– What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
– Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
– Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
– Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
– What the secret to communicating with Trump is
– What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers
Never before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.

There are plenty of revelations as indicated in the blurb. It reads like a thriller and is a real page turner, relating story after story of pure awfulness. Whilst there have been plenty of doubts cast about the veracity of some of the detail of some aspects the overall impression of utter and total chaos and a Whitehouse full of largely terrible and/or incompetent individuals (all with very distinctive names) is inescapable. It’s not going to end well.

I kept being reminded of this while reading it:

And this quote was really striking:

The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—“professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.

In addition, one of the most improbably named individuals, Reince Priebus, who spent six months as Trump’s Chief of Staff, and doesn’t come out of it terribly positively, I kept imagining was actually a fictional royal relation of a famous Ian Rankin detective, Prince Rebus. That didn’t help.